On Thursday 16 October 2008 10:58:36 am Richard Kojedzinszky wrote: > dear all, > > Is there any possibility to busybox's dd support the iflag= and oflag= > options, especially with the direct flag? I need to read a block device > with O_DIRECT, and it would be nice to dd support that.
I agree with Linus on this one - O_DIRECT is a Wrong Thing to Do, and should not have been created from the start. Instead of asking to read/write "directly" to the device, (what is "directly"? There is no unambiguous answer to that) there should be a flag "I will be reading/writing a lot and in huge chunks, do not bother caching this data". And maybe another flag "kernel, if I feed you badly aligned buffer and you can't use DMA efficiently because of this, please error out so that I know that". One of the above, or both, is what you guys imply when you say "I need to use O_DIRECT". Don't tell kernel hot to do its work. Tell it what you want to achieve. But Oracle monkeys won this one for now. :( I will accept patches which implement iflag= and oflag= and O_DIRECT support for busybox dd, but I'm not inclined to write them myself. -- vda _______________________________________________ busybox mailing list [email protected] http://busybox.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/busybox
